As presently exists, physical computing devices provide a myriad of services. Most have an installed backup agent or other mechanism interacting with a remote backup server to provide restoration services in the event of failure. Performing backup operations in this manner often requires that backup traffic goes over the production network, thereby affecting performance of services that are more directly related to the business.
Furthermore, modern data centers face a sprawl of virtual machines. In such situations, these virtual machines have almost all data to backup and simply having a backup agent to stream traffic to a backup server tends to even more stress the LAN. Also, implementing another LAN only for backup is costly.
Some vendors of virtual machine (VM) technology have implemented an optimization where backups of data are performed by means of a backup proxy: a system whose sole purpose is to connect to the data that needs to be backed up (residing in a VM file, a copy on write snapshot of a file, in a LUN, or in a copy on write snapshot of a LUN) and stream the backup traffic over a dedicated network to a backup server. Existing solutions however rely on physical systems to host the backup proxy, which has limitations.
Using a static physical system limits file level backups to those file systems that are directly supported by the operating system on that physical system. For example, if a Windows 2003 Standard Server is used as a proxy for backup, such as in VMWare's Consolidated Backup (VCB), then a file level backup of data residing in a Ext3 file system is not possible, as a Windows 2003 Standard Server cannot connect to that file system and hence not to the data.
Furthermore there are limits to scalability, as physical systems are expensive and inflexible to work with, should the amount of concurrent backups be increased.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art of computing backup for less costs. The need further contemplates a system that can provide commonality to ease coordination and management activities in a single computing device requiring backup. Even more, the need should extend to virtual environments, each with many domains per a single hardware platform. Naturally, any improvements along such lines should further contemplate good engineering practices, such as ease of implementation, unobtrusiveness, stability, etc.